This may be the most insightful writing about authentication in years:

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From my brief time at Google, my internship at Yahoo!, and conversations with other companies doing web authentication at scale, I’ve observed that as authentication systems develop they gradually merge with other abuse-fighting systems dealing with various forms of spam (email, account creation, link, etc.) and phishing. Authentication eventually loses its binary nature and becomes a fuzzy classification problem.</p><p>This is not a new observation. It’s generally accepted for banking authentication and some researchers like Dinei Florêncio and Cormac Herley have made it for web passwords. Still, much of the security research community thinks of password authentication in a binary way [..]. Spam and phishing provide insightful examples: technical solutions (like Hashcash, DKIM signing, or EV certificates), have generally failed but in practice machine learning has greatly reduced these problems. The theory has largely held up that with enough data we can train reasonably effective classifiers to solve seemingly intractable problems.
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